GNOME launch failure

[Stefan Bruda]

Hi,

I am having a puzzling experience with the following setting: GNOME
desktop with enlightenment as window manager (set using the WINDOW_MANAGER
environment variable from within .xinitrc).  The experience goes as
follows: Everything works as advertised until I upgrade some GNOME
components, namely gtk2 (from 2.12.1_0 to 2.12.2_0+x11), cairo (from
1.4.10_0 to 1.4.12_0), and glib2 (from 2.14.3_0 to 2.14.4_1).  After the
upgrade the GNOME desktop refuses to show up (there is a delay, then the
GNOME splash screen appears briefly together with a dialogue that does not
show anything, then nothing else happens).  Nothing shows in the logs.  A
ps shows gnome-session, bonobo-activation, gconf-2, gnome-vfs, and e16.

What I have done to attempt to pinpoint the problem: e16 alone works fine
as desktop manager; changing the GNOME window manager from e16 to metacity
or even quartz-wm does not change anything; deactivating the offending
packages one by one and activating their old versions does not fix
anything (unless all three are reverted to the old versions--when this
happens everything begins to work all of a sudden).

I am almost sure (given past experiences) that I have to rebuild some
dependencies of these packages, but I cannot figure out which ones.  Any
hint is appreciated.

Many thanks in advance,
Stefan

P.S.  Does anybody have any experience with
GNOME+enlightenment+firefox-x11 working (or not) under 10.5?  I really
want to upgrade but this is my production machine and I am afraid of
potential issues.